A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

A view of East Wind Lake, a man-made lake at the center of the condominium where I lived from February 1978 to April 2016.  Looking to the south on a midsummer afternoon circa 2013. Note the cumulonimbus cloud forming in the background. (Photo by the author.) Hello again and welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, a recurring feature in A Certain Point of View where I step out of my usual review of product reviewer or budding screenwriter and just talk about "stuff." Don't get me wrong; I love writing reviews about music albums, books, movies (especially movies!), and the occasional computer game, but there are days when I wake up in the morning and I don't feel like doing the "same old, same old." Today, apparently, is one of those days. It's almost 3 PM in my corner of the Sunshine State; outside, the temperature is 88℉ (31℃) under partly sunny skies; with humidity at 63%, the "feels-like" temperature is 98℉ (36℃). It's ...

Apollo 11 Mission Insignia.  "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - Astronaut (and Mission Commander) Neil A. Armstrong, July 20, 1969 It was 50 years ago today (at 20:17 UTC) that the lunar module Eagle, carrying Mission Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Buzz Aldrin, landed on the surface of the Moon. Six hours and 39 minutes later, before a worldwide television audience, Armstrong emerged from the Eagle and, uttering the now-famous phrase, "That's one small step for man....," became the first human to set foot on Earth's only natural satellite. At that moment, the Space Race that began on October 4, 1957 with the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit, was over. After trailing the Russians in various milestones  - Soviet cosmonauts were the first to fly into space, to perform a spacewalk, and launch a woman into orbit - the landing of Apollo 11 wa...

Tempus fugit. That, my dear readers, is Latin for "time flies." Today is Friday, July 19, 2019. Another regular work-week is about to come to an end. Just a few days ago it was Monday. Where did the time go? My mom, about 10 years before I was born, at Laguna de Tota in Colombia. One of my cousins says he went there recently and found that the boat in the photo at the top left still exists.  Tempus fugit. Four years ago today, exactly, it was a gray, rainy Sunday afternoon. My mom had died in the pre-dawn hours and by seven-thirty in the morning the people from the funeral home had come for her body. The last time I saw Mom at our townhouse in East Wind Lake Village, she was being wheeled outside on a gurney, with a train of people that included my older half-sister and two of her cousins. The nurse from the Catholic hospice trailed behind, no doubt eager to get home after spending 16 hours keeping a watch on my mother. I sat on the edge of the sofa, too tired...

Apollo 11 mission insignia. I was six years old when American astronauts landed on the Moon half a century ago.  Earlier this week, I watched director Todd Douglas Miller's 2019 documentary Apollo 11, a 93-minute "direct cinema" account of the first Apollo Project manned mission to land on the Moon. I thought it was a good way to begin commemorating the 50th Anniversary of one of the most significant human achievements in history, even though in some ways it left me feeling more than a little sad. Fifty years ago today, Apollo 11 was still four days away from its liftoff. American astronauts had orbited the Moon twice already by then; Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to orbit the Moon in December of 1968, while Apollo 10 (May 18-26, 1969) was a dress rehearsal in which the Command Service Module and the Lunar Module flew with three astronauts in the F mission that tested the equipment and maneuvers necessary for a successful lunar landing. But the G mission (the...

Our last family photo was taken on July 11, 2015. Mom passed away eight days later  As much as I enjoy having a Facebook account , and even taking into account that for the time being it is my main link to my friends and family, sometimes I get emotional curveballs tossed at me via its Memories feature. If you don't have a Facebook account (and I can think of at least one individual who does not have one), all you need to know is that every day, the social network re-publishes posts one created on the same date x years ago. The Memories posts are, of course, highly dependent on the content you create daily on Facebook. If, for instance, I share a post from this blog on my timeline today, the Memories feature will repost it on my timeline on April 25, 2020 (unless, of course, I turn off the feature). Over the past few days (not today, mercifully), I have seen a couple of re-posts that have made me relive the beginning of the darkest period of my life: the decline and e...

Fifty years on. A half-century ago, I was a six-year-old boy who lived in a large apartment in Bogota with my mom and two live-in maids (Lily and Olimpia). I was about to start first grade at Colegio El Nogal, a private Catholic school run by Nidia de Hakim, an acquaintance of my grandparents and mother. I don't remember much about the school now; fifty years on, I only have vague fragments of memories; the campus was a remodeled mansion with many rooms and long dark hallways...the pencil sharpener was in a closet outside one of the rows of classrooms, and we had two meals on school grounds during the school day: onces (which was a mid-morning snack), and lunch (around one in the afternoon). I also remember that we wore uniforms to school; blue-black-and-white plaid shorts, knee-high blue socks, blue-white wingtip shoes, white dress shirts, and blue sweaters with the school's monogram (EN)) in white letters on the upper left of the chest area. School days began at 9 AM and ...

My sig box from Miami-Dade Community College, South Campus' student paper, circa 1987  When I was a journalism student at Miami-Dade Community College’s South (now Kendall) Campus, I worked on the campus student newspaper from 1985 to 1989. I started out as a Staff Writer and finished my “tour of duty” as Managing Editor. As a result of this unusually long stint, I had the opportunity to write for every section of the paper: News, Opinions, Diversions, Features, and even Sports. I was even the campus paper’s first foreign correspondent when I participated in the College Consortium for International Studies’ Semester in Spain – Seville program in the Fall Term of the 1988-89. One of my favorite assignments was as a contributor for an experimental Features section that we ran during the Winter Term of the ’86-87 academic year. It was called About Time. In it, we published pieces about different personal experiences, ranging from humorous to bathetic topics based on events...

May 25, 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the theatrical debut of George Lucas' Star Wars, a space-fantasy film set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." And if you are a regular reader of this blog - or know me well in real life - you know that I'm a die-hard fan...you know, the kind of guy who goes around saying "These aren't the droids you're looking for," or "I have a bad feeling about this."  This wasn't always the case, though. When the film, which was re-titled as Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope - premiered on Wednesday, May 25, 1977, I was nowhere near a theater that screened it. In fact, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was - get this - a Japanese-made science fiction film made for young children. I was 14 then, and since I preferred more grown-up fare, I totally ignored it....at least for a while. (C) 1977 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation I first saw  Star Wars  (aka  Star Wars - Episod...

It's Sunday,. December 16, 2012.  It's nice outside - sunny, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and not humid - and I really want to go for a walk or simply go to the "little pool" on 97th Place and read a book out in the fresh air.  Problem is, I can't do any of that because on weekends my mom's Nursing South Corporation aide is only here to perform what is called "personal hygiene duties" and can't stay longer than one hour. In fact, she's not even here yet and it's almost 1:30 PM.  So because my mom is confined to bed and practically helpless, I am here in what used to be our dining room trying to write anything...a review, Facebook posts, emails or a blog entry.  I need to exercise my mind somehow, since I can't watch TV or listen to music during Mom's waking hours in case she calls for me from her room. I love my mom dearly and I try to carry out my duties as a caregiver with as best an outlook as I can muster, but some days, like toda...

Although I like to read different types of books about the Second World War, I don’t usually read memoirs written by the participants because (a) most of them are written by generals or politicians, (b) they can be tedious to read and/or (c) the authors have axes to grind or are trying to twist history in order to enhance their reputation at the expense of the truth.  (In other words, they can often be self-serving and even misleading.)  There are other reasons why memoirs don’t attract my attention as a reader in the same fashion as books like Cornelius Ryan’s  A Bridge Too Far  or Stephen E. Ambrose’s  Band of Brothers  do; as historian Ronald H. Spector ( Eagle Against the Sun )  puts it, “Memoirs of wars and politics usually become less interesting with the passage of time.”  Readers who were born a generation after V-E or V-J Day find such works as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe  (1948) or Winston Churchill’s six-volume opu...

Mom as a teenager (circa 1943) Although I do not plan to turn my blog into a dreary litany of gripes about my current situation, I need to be able to get a few things off my chest.  I don't have too many people to turn to these days, and although I could probably start a discussion on my Facebook page about the dark side of care giving, I think that would do more harm than good. I'm writing at a moment of relative peace and quiet.  Margarita, the morning aide, came by and cleaned up Mom in bed since my mother no longer gets up to take showers even when she has assistants.  Margarita is only here for an hour on Saturdays and Sundays, so much of her time is devoted to cleaning Mom and doing light housekeeping chores in the bedroom, kitchen (if I haven't done it yet) and living room areas. Because Mom wanted to sleep late today, I ended up giving her breakfast at an hour more suitable for lunch: 12:15 PM.  I've been up since eight in the morning, having fallen...

Summer of ’42 (1971) Part One: An Overview of Summer of '42 Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant. In everyone's life, I often think, there is a  Summer of '42  (or '52, or '62, and so on....), a time in which we discover the joys and sorrows of growing up...and falling in love. There are hijinks and pranks, jokes and playful insults...and always the bonds of friendship. But sometimes, in those days of discovery and self-awareness, we feel the angst of that first attraction, the bittersweet highs and lows of falling seriously in love for the first time – sometimes with the right person, sometimes not. And of course, we feel the heartbreak of losing that cherished love...wondering what on Earth happened. Based on an actual event i...